Actually me any my team, we are currently building a huge Web Application using ExtJS as presentation framework with a combination of different technologies on server side. The Main Application is using .net, but there are also several Parts which are using Java. The Communication atm is completely solved by HTTPHandlers, which output JSON.

The Application is organized in Modules, both on server and on client side, on client side every Module has his own namespace, own components and stuff and defined interfaces for communication between the modules, all based on events, pretty loose coupled.

Now we are at a point, where new Modules are going to be implemented, and since they already exists on server side with some "old web frontend", we just want to redo the presentation layer and came up with the idea not to use ExtJS and HTTPHandlers for this parts, as they are written in Java, but to use ExtGWT.

The question is, how can we combine this. Actually what I need is some kind of "ExtGWT-ExtJs-Panel" where the ExtGWT-content is rendered to and which may fire some Events for communication with other non-ExtGWT-Parts of the Application.

Is this possible somehow or do you think this will end up in a real mess?

Thanks in advance!

Best Regards

Martin

Colin Alworth

27 Apr 2009, 7:16 AM

I believe that Extjs components can be given an id where they should insert their content - you might consider setting the id of a ContentPanel or LayoutContainer to something you know to be unique, and then feed that to the inner ExtJs components.

Passing events back and forth (esp resize) shouldnt be too bad, but it will take some JSNI on the GWT side to pull off. The hard part (if you even need to go there) is to get any data and service methods to talk back and forth.

Good luck - we are working the other way around for some of our code, injecting GWT stuff into existing ext (and other framework) pages, but we might need to take this route for some stuff - if you find any special tricks that prove helpful, keep us updated?